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Many years ago I had a butterfly knife in my fishing tackle box. If you don’t know the style, its handle is in two parts, both hinged at the blade so the handle folds over both edges of the blade. I was quite adept at flicking it open, using it and flicking it closed again. Since you held both halves of the handle when it was open it could not close on your fingers in use.

I had that style because I could open and close it one-handed while trying to deal with a line or a fish with the other hand, and because when folded, it was safe to delve your hand into the fishing box without looking.

Then they were made illegal and I couldn’t use it any more. Instead I had a lock-knife. This had a little lump on the side of the blade so you could pop it open with one hand and it would lock open. No danger of it folding on your fingers. Not as handy as the butterfly because you needed two hands to close it again (liner lock – you have to press down a spring on the back while folding the blade) but nonetheless safer than either a fixed blade or a folding non-locking one.

Then they banned those too.

I have never stabbed or cut anyone or even threatened them with a knife, yet now all I am allowed is an unsafe folding knife. I don’t think any fixed-blade knife is legal outside the home but they wouldn’t be safe in a fishing box anyway. They can slip out of the sheath when the box is moved. The non-locking folding one is safe in the box but not safe in use because it can fold onto fingers, especially those slimy from handling fish – and it needs both hands to open it.

The only knife you can carry in public in the UK is a non-locking folding penknife with a blade less than 3 inches (7.5cm) in length. Anything else and you will have to prove to a court that you had a damn good reason to have it. This applies even if you had it out of sight and didn’t even show anyone – if you are stopped and searched and it is found, you’re arrested and charged.

In the seventies, after a camping trip, I got off the train in Cardiff with an eight-inch camping knife on my belt and went shopping. Nobody even noticed. Now they’d have helicopters and armed police surrounding me. I wouldn’t have to do anything, wouldn’t even have to touch the handle of the knife. Mere possession is a crime now.

Oh, and I bought that camping knife, alone, in a shop, when I was 15. Try that now, all you teen warriors demanding ever tighter controls on your lives. By the time you get to my age you’ll need to be over 30 and have three forms of ID to buy a paper clip.

Let me reiterate. It is illegal in the UK, and has been for some time, to be in possession in public of anything bigger than a folding three-inch knife. Anything else and you need to have a good reason to be carrying it.

National figures show police in England and Wales recorded a rise of a fifth in knife and gun crime in the year to September.

Right. So the answer to people committing illegal acts using things that are already illegal is not to enforce those laws, but to make new ones that make more things illegal.

I notice there is no mention in the article of a clampdown on guns. Oh wait, those are already illegal. Criminals don’t care about laws though. What to do, eh? Well, there are a lot of Americans who think gun control will end shootings, including one I came across on Twitter who describes herself in her bio as ‘open minded’ and has a banner saying ‘The NRA are a terrorist organisation’.

Actually, more vegan animal rights activists (1) than NRA members (0) have gone on shooting sprees lately so as terrorist organisations go, I’d say the NRA really haven’t got the hang of it at all.

Back to the knives. The plan is to make even more forms of knives illegal, and to make buying them online as near to impossible as they can make it. Well. That’ll have no effect at all on street stabbings.

If the stabber is over 18 they can get a knife in a local shop. If the stabber is under 18 they will simply take one from their parents’ kitchen. Making them harder to buy will do nothing at all.

You cannot buy a handgun legally in the UK but criminals seem to have no problem getting them anyway. Knives? You can make one in your shed with a hammer, file, whetstone and a piece of fencing steel! You could even make one from oak or hickory. Yeah, it won’t work for long but it doesn’t need to, does it? Actually I won’t go into any more detail on that one because it has details I don’t want to hand out to any Mr. Stabbys out there.

The problem is not knives. Especially since carrying anything bigger than a whittling penknife in public is already illegal. The problem is people stabbing each other. Nobody in Government wants to address that. Oh, we know why but they made it illegal to say it.

Soon it will be illegal to be in possession of a set of kitchen knives in public and impossible to buy them online and have them posted to you. So, if you need kitchen knives, how are you going to get them home?

I have bought whisky online. I once bought a log splitter online. The delivery courier had to check I was of legal age to have them before handing them over. If there is nobody of legal age to sign for them then they won’t deliver. So, under-18s buying knives online can only get them if an adult signs for the delivery. That’s law now. They cannot ‘sneakily order them’ because the delivery agent won’t hand them over to the kid.

It’s the same as the argument that tobacco companies ‘market to children’. It’s as ridiculous as claiming Danish Bacon ‘markets to Jews’. Why would you ‘market’ a product to a group who are not allowed to buy it?

Likewise, it does not matter how hard you market your range of bladed items, scissors or dressmaking pins to those under 18. They are not allowed to buy them. Yes, I said dressmaking pins and scissors. You can get married at 16 in this country but you can’t buy anything sharp until you are 18 so you’ll have a married life with only plastic knives and forks for your first two years and can’t hang any pictures because you can’t buy nails.

This is not ‘where we are going’. This is where we are. Now. Today. And an allegedly Conservative government under the daftest woman ever put in charge of anything is about to make it worse.

There has been a lot of talk about Corbyn’s mob of hate-filled harpies (I’ve met a few and yes, they are) and how the Labour party needs to sort itself out. The damn Tories need a purge too. They are, really, no better. Criminalising people who want to buy a bread knife online? Stating that anyone in possession of acid in public is committing a crime? What the hell do they think is in a car battery? What do they think the chemical definition of vinegar is? Are they going to arrest anyone in possession of a lemon?

Ludicrous? Of course it is. It all is. We have a ludicrous government and a ludicrous opposition. What else can you expect from them?

If someone wants to buy a bottle of sulphuric acid, that should raise a red flag. They might want it for a legitimate purpose of course, in which case they won’t mind providing ID and having the sale recorded. I have no problem giving my name and address and proving who I am when I buy a scythe blade or any of the viciously sharp items in my tool room. I really wouldn’t be happy with a random lunatic having access to those things.

If I buy dangerous chemicals or bacteria for the lab I have to prove I have a lab capable of containing them and that I am a legitimate scientist with the knowledge to safely handle these things. That is as it should be – I can, and have, bought live cultures of some seriously dangerous bacteria in the past. That should not be available to some spotty teen who wanders in off the street. Okay, they’d probably kill themselves before they killed anyone else but even so… do you want to ban all research into intestinal disease becasue the causative agents are dangerous? I bet there are some who do, you know.

The law will just say ‘acid’. Leaving a chip shop with vinegar on your chips? You are in possession of an acid in a public place. The law they propose will get you arrested for that.

Would the police be so petty? Hahahaha! They recently revealed on Twitter the ‘weapons’ they found in a sweep in London. A butter knife, a rubber mallet and a garden fork. Derisory. No guns, machetes, Samurai swords (why is it always Samurai swords? I find the short double-edged sword much easier to handle). Not even a big camping knife. Nothing that wouldn’t be laughed at by the man in the street but would be taken very seriously by a dusty judge in one of our zombified courts.

So, imagining they are only looking for 20-molar and above concentrated and actually corrosive acids is not being real. They will arrest you for having cranberry juice. Incidentally, if you don’t know what I mean by ‘molar’, please don’t lecture me on acids.

It’s not just acids that are corrosive. Better not hand out blatant clues but getting past the ‘acid’ part and still having something deadly is not actually a problem for those of us who had a genuine education.

Finally, a lot of legitimate businesses are about to bite the dust. I bought a lot of great stuff here in the past – including the heavy hat in the top banner – and I’ll order something – anything – in the next few days to give them a little boost before the government shuts them down. They have never been linked to any crime, ever. Their only ‘crime’ is selling sharp things. Like these guys and a lot of other innocent businesses too.

Once they ban all blades online, of course, nothing will change in the World of Stabby so they’ll ban the sale of knives in the high street too. Think they won’t? Then you have not been paying attention to how this works.

I already have a peening hammer, plain hammer, files, whetstones, oilstones and a grinder in my tool room. If you don’t, then get those things now before they are banned too.

It’ll be the only way to make something to cut your tofu when you grow up, kids.

Oh, and if they still have metalwork classes in schools, take that class and pay close attention. You’re going to need it.

Better wake up in chemistry class too, if that even still exists. You might need that one.

Fear not, this is not about the railways. Although today I did find the little battery-powered 00 gauge freelance tram/train I made about 25 years ago. It ran on an oval of track set into concrete on a rockery. The track might still be there, it was a pretty damn fine job. I also found the only 009 narrow gauge engine I made, using a plastic kit of a saddle tank engine and the (always overscale anyway) motor from a Lima N gauge Deltic. That’s a Class 55, for those who don’t recognise the term. I must test those tomorrow.

No, this is about the current trend of ‘no-platforming’ anyone students don’t agree with. It makes them feel big and important while making them look small-minded, weak and petty, but it’s not just students.

I’ve been blocked by a few people on Twitter. Well, okay, more than a few. Sometimes I’ll follow a link in a conversation and find I’ve been blocked by someone I didn’t know existed, much less ever interacted with. Does this trouble me? I shrug and move on. It’s only Twitter. Someone I never heard of doesn’t want me to read what they write. There’s too much crap out there anyway, if they want to spare me their additions to it, that’s fine with me.

I have blocked two, I think, and those were both done in a state of tipsy truculence. Not rage, not righteousness, I was a bit pissed and felt like going ‘nyah’ at them. That’s all there was to it.

Why would I want to block lots of people? Why go to all the bother of writing stuff then limiting who can read it? Blocking someone really does not affect them at all, they can babble away to their heart’s content. They just aren’t reading what you write any more. What they write is unaffected. Also, blocking people who have never interacted with you at all means only one thing. They will never see anything you write. No matter how cogent, how persuasive your argument, they will never see it. That really is all it means.

I might be blocked by hundreds of people I’ve never heard of. I’ll never know nor care. I’ll never read a word they write. I won’t even know they have written anything. It doesn’t stop me writing, it doesn’t affect me, and yet they think it is a triumph of some kind. Well okay, have your invisible victory. Enjoy it, crow about it, revel in it. I’ll never even know.

Much the same goes for the ‘mute’ facility on Twitter. I have muted a few. Persistent adverts with nothing real to say, the stupid photoshopped ‘diseases’, things like that, I mute them. Does that make them upset?

They don’t know they’ve been muted and the muting only applies to me. They can continue to tweet to their hearts’ content, untroubled and entirely unaffected by the fact that I don’t see those tweets. The only person I have deprived of information by using the mute button is me. I just don’t want that information so I ignore it in the same way I can drive past a hundred advertising billboards and not know what a single one was advertising. They are filtered out. Mentally muted. And yet they are still there, their messages intact. I just don’t see them. Same thing, really.

This is ‘no-platforming’. It’s ‘I’m not listening to you and I’m not speaking to you’, usually followed in its normal context by ‘nyah’ because it’s the attitude of a five year old or someone very, very drunk.

I have never used ‘mute’ to silence an argument. Only to filter out persistent ads and silly things. I only used ‘block’ twice and I was pissed both times. I would never block someone who disagrees with me because how can I persuade them they are wrong if I have no voice? It would be like going to a debating contest with a ball gag in your mouth.

And yet it is common on Twitter for people to block anyone who even so much as asks an awkward question. What does it achieve? The person asking the question never gets an answer, never sees another word you write and assumes you are an arse without an argument. Do you win in that scenario? I don’t see that as a win. I see that as running away. So does the person you blocked.

When students ‘no-platform’ a speaker, it means they don’t hear what that speaker has to say. It means they have no opportunity to challenge it, to argue against it. It does not stop that speaker saying what they have to say somewhere else. The speaker does not lose by not speaking at an event where they’d just be shouted down anyway, where they would be blocked and muted. They benefit by having more time to present their argument to someone who will listen.

So what do modern students have?

Safe spaces. Hiding places for the weak and the cowardly. Where you cannot be hurt by the words of the horrible speaky people. Those are the new thing. It used to be foxholes and trenches where you could shelter from bullets. Now it’s places where nobody can say hurty words. What a feeble species we have become. What a sad and worthless animal. You know, there are rabbits and squirrels who would be absolutely delighted if a fox just called them names.

All this bollocks is getting called out now. There will be a new overseer of universities with the power to fine them or even de-register them. It has teeth. It remains to be seen whether it will use them, or whether this overseer will be populated by whining saddos who will file those teeth to nothing.

The student activists will not care. That will get very interesting indeed when the first university is de-registered because that university can no longer award degrees. The students who worked hard to get degrees won’t get them. The student activists won’t care because degrees are elitist and they didn’t need them anyway – but the majority who do care are going to rip those idiots apart. Literally.

And the Leftie staff the activists relied on… will have been defunded and will not be welcome in any other university, so they will change sides faster than Italy.

I think it will take one de-registered university, two at most, before the governing bodies actually grow a fucking brain and realise they have been playing around in Narnia for years. No more silly degrees, no more pandering to the pansies who are scared of words. Back to some real, actual learning and proper studies again. And to degrees that are worth having and students worth employing.

It all hinges on this new overseer. Will it really do what it says on the tin?

I found out today that the common mispronunciation of Allahu Akbar by Western media and others (Aloo Akbar) actually has a meaning.

It means ‘potatoes are greatest’.

Something an Irish terrorist might shout.

There you are. Islamophobia and racism in a few lines of text. Except… I got that ‘Aloo Akbar’ information from Muslims who wonder why our media worship potatoes, and the Irish are, by and large, the same race as me.

Oh it won’t stop the perpetually offended. Twice on Twitter in the last couple of days I have seen women aghast that Maybelline call an eyeliner ‘negro’ in [the current year]. They don’t call it that, of course. The label they show is actually ‘black – negro – noir’ which is ‘black’ in English, Spanish and French. Because, you see, Maybelline sell in more than one country. I expect to see outrage that Maybelline have culturally appropriated a French film genre in a day or so.

Halloween was marred by the politically correct bollocks that you can’t dress up racist and you can’t ‘culturally appropriate’ and you can’t celebrate ‘white beauty’ because we crackers are all ugly fuckers. Good to know it’s not just me. All those non-whites dating white women/men are doing it out of charity and pity because ‘white beauty’ is merely a capitalist construct to make us feel like we actually matter. Aren’t we hideous White Walkers lucky to be in the company of such generous real humans?

Meanwhile all those non-European non-Pagans happily culturally appropriate the entire day and dress up as paperclips and cat litter trays and other crap that has nothing to do with the real festival. Light a bonfire and as it dies down, jump through the flames to shed the demons that have been following you all year. If you want to do something else, fine, but anything you do is going to be wrong so you might as well do what the hell you like. You can even whine ‘cultural appropriation’ while you do it. And you get to keep your demons.

Another Twitter idiot was incensed that Donnie Trump suggested sending yesterday’s Islamic death delivery driver to Gitmo, when he never said any such thing about the country music hater in Las Vegas. Well, saying such a thing about that loony would have been somewhat pointless since he was dead at the scene. Perhaps Trumpy should have sent his corpse to Gitmo to teach him a lesson. He won’t do it again.

Didn’t Barry O’Blimey get elected the first time round on a promise to shut down Gitmo? It’s still there. Nobody seems to mind.

Then of course, there is the statement from our own mathematical wonder, Diane Abbott, that even a stopped clock is right once a day… We are not yet on the Communist 12-hour day, Diane.

Michael Fallon, defence minister, has resigned over allegations that he touched a woman on the knee fifteen years ago. The woman in question has stated that she was not offended, she told him at the time that if he did it again she’d punch him in the face and he didn’t do it again. As far as she was concerned, that was it. Didn’t stop the Mail making it headline news.

The Holy Ones of Labour, who sacked an MP for pointing out that there was far greater sexual abuse going on in Rotherham, whose leader showed nude pics of a colleague he had sex with, and who are facing allegations of rape at a party conference, are of course utterly incensed at historic knee touching and rebuffed advances on the Tory side.

The offences, aside from actual rape and molestation, are trivial. Some are listed as having a relationship with another MP or a member of staff – no sign of it being in any way forced. Yet these are far more serious than systematic child rape in Rotherham, in the twisted minds of many people.

The levels of stupid out there now are mind-blowing. You can tell people anything and as long as it shocks them, they’ll believe it. They will ignore real evil and focus on your pretend evil if you do it just right. How far can you push this? There is absolutely no limit!

The BBC will help too. They have reported the protests by farmers in South Africa. Those are white farmers who are being tortured to death in their homes and the South African government and justice system not only doesn’t care, it jails them for defending themselves. The BBC reports the farmers’ protests are ‘likely to stir up racial tensions’. When one race is free to torture another race to death, that’s about as fucking tense as it gets in my book.

The BBC are also mystified as to why people are so angry at Kevin Spacey for coming out as gay. Nobody is angry at him for that. People are angry at his molestation of a 14-year-old which came out the same day as he deflected the story by coming out himself.

Just twist it right, make straight white men the bad guys, and you can lie to your heart’s content and the drones will suck it all up. Oh it’s not just non-whites who are this dim. In fact many non-whites are speaking out against the crap now. There are plenty of white people calling for the extinction of the white race, although so far not a single one has volunteered to be first. I’ll develop a grain of respect for these cretins when they practice what they preach.

Then we have the whole transsexual thing. For some it’s a real thing and going through that much surgery must be really hard to do. Personally I dread even going to the dentist even though she’s pretty (can’t be true, she’s white). Yet some people think it’s worth it and good luck to them. I hope it brings them peace and some happiness.

Now, however, we have a pressure group wanting trans- diagnoses for children. Little Johnny dresses up in his mother’s heels and face paint (ah yes, they call it makeup, I remember) and suddenly he needs counselling and hormone injections and puberty blockers…

Kids love to dress up. They love to emulate their parents. Give 5 year old Mary a set of overalls and a plastic spanner and she’ll play ‘fix the car’ with her dad. It does not mean she is really a boy. It means she loves to play with her dad. And maybe she’ll grow into the kind of girl who can look under a car bonnet (hood, for the rebel colonists across the pond) and recognise what she sees in there. We could do with more of those. Women drive cars, they should know how the machine works.

We now have more varieties of gender than Heinz. Look up duck-billed platypus reproductive genetics and marvel that we are now even more complicated than that despite the fact that we aren’t.

Incidentally, the duck-billed platypus, along with most Australian wildlife, is certain proof that God is all in favour of large quantities of whisky. No God could have come up with that thing sober. I have Glen Garioch tonight and I put all my drunken creations in the bottom box in emulation of God.

Kids don’t know what to think about sex until they hit puberty. Trans-ing them before puberty is abuse. Even shortly after. Let the hormones settle, let them figure out who they are and who they want to be. Don’t force it on them because 99% of the time you will be wrong. Then you have utterly fucked up their lives for the sake of profit. Rich surgeons don’t care about post-operative infections or a race of infertile humans. They just want money, it’s what they want. The Beatles said it first but the Flying Lizards said it better.

Sex is the thing of the day. Male, female, intersex, diddlysex, flibbertyflobberty sex, many other distractions which serve only to keep the terminally offended busy while the rest of us ignore them.

You can try to see through the wall of stupid that is building fast or you can play with it and maybe knock a few bricks out of place on the way. Their feelings will be hurt if they ever grow up enough to realise it but it’s not very likely so don’t worry too much.

Towards the end of that article we see ‘no industry funding of research should be accepted’ which will bring a smirk to the face of Big Tobacco and Big Booze and others. Mine too.

I work for commercial food companies. Tomorrow I’m driving to Inverness to talk about cheese. I do not do dodgy research like the anti-everything shitheads produce. If I don’t think it will work I will tell them that. If they want to pressure me into getting a particular result, I go home. I’m a research consultant, not a PR consultant. You want lies, go talk to ASH or pretty much any politician. If your stuff turns out to be crap or even dangerous, that’s what my report will say. Up to you to publish or suppress it.

The thing I’m going to talk about tomorrow cannot possibly be dangerous. It sounds like it could be really impressive but we’ll see. It would be a nice change for me to work with something that doesn’t come with the proviso ‘one slip and you die’.

I haven’t ever worked for a salt or sugar producer. I’d love to work for a chocolate company, the freebies would be most welcome. However, working for a company does not temper my comments. I don’t much care about money because I’ve never had very much of it and it’s not interesting in itself. It just lets me buy more train stuff on eBay.

I will, and have, lost research work through honesty. I could have taken the money for projects that were never going to work but I told them at the first meeting – ‘this cannot work because…’

It’s all good. I might not have much but I seem to be able to get what I need. It’s not true that working for a company means you are owned by that company – not unless you want to be. Nobody can offer me enough to keep silent if I see something to rant about. I cannot stop the rants. Okay, I’ve never really tried but I probably couldn’t. Research is different. It’s commercial so no details. Company behaviour is fair game.

I know someone high in the ranks of the Scottish Food Standards Agency. She doesn’t like me much. That’s understandable. We worked together on probiotics for a while and we were at loggerheads most of the time. I wanted it to work, she wanted to please the company sponsors. She got the high paying job, I ended up redundant and self-employed.

I think I got the better deal in the end, although it has been tough at times. Even so, my principles are intact. I win. She has riches, I have integrity. I still say I win.

So okay. This nutritionist does a bit of work for a chocolate company. Does that disqualify her as a nutritionist? Depends what she tells them to a small extent. It depends on whether she lets them tell her what to tell others to a much larger extent, and I doubt that is happening. No chocolate company would ever attempt to say ‘choc is good for you’ at this moment. Even when there is real research that shows it is.

Her Righteous friends have declared her heretic. She touched the enemy! Yes, they are really that insular.

It’s a witch hunt. ‘You took money from a proper company rather than live like a tapeworm on taxes? A Witch! Burn her!’

Silence her in case she refutes the Doctrine of the Drones. This has happened so many times now and still the drones believe it all. How do these people remember to breathe? I have cultures of bacteria that wouldn’t fall for this kind of idiot programming. People fall for it all – smoking, vaping, global warming, salt, sugar, you name it, they will believe it.

The Righteous have learned how to manipulate the drones. It was never hard. Bread and circuses gave them the way to do it. Labour party and television took their drone lives from them and ripped away all the potential they could have had. They won’t see it, don’t bother. They are lost and they love their oblivion. They are parasites and proud of it. They don’t even realise they have a purpose and a master who controls their thoughts, but it will hit them smack in the face someday soon.

Too late to resist. Their domino will fall and they will look for support – but all the supporting dominoes are already down. The ones who produced, who worked, who made money. The ones they toppled. In the name of Fighting Big Companies For No Reason Other Than That They Exist.

The dominoes are going down. Everyone’s turn is coming. Can you stop it? My domino is already down and I see nobody who wants to help re-stand it. Why would I help with yours? I’ll just drop a hint.

If you want to wipe out an ants’ nest, you have to kill the queen. Then you get peace.

Do you see your enemy now? I know most of the readers here already have but one day a curious drone might happen by.

They’ll just mind-wipe what they’ve read though. Maybe, just one, will understand.

Today I was blocked again on Twitter. It’s what the indoctrinated and the one-track-minded would love to do in real life: just silence any alternative viewpoint. Except… it doesn’t silence anyone. It just stops the blocker’s involvement in the conversation.

So I guess the one who blocked me won’t see this. Should I start to care, I’ll be sure to post an update. I’ve given up on these people. They cannot bear to consider any other view and I long ago tired of talking to walls.

His argument was that cattle produce methane, methane causes global warming, so if people eat less beef there’ll be less cattle and thereby save the planet.

I pointed out that if he wants less cattle then he must also restrict all milk products. I mentioned falling dominoes. Twitter’s limitations did not allow me to elaborate the difference between beef and dairy herds and I doubt he’d be interested anyway. Nor would he be interested in hearing about all the other ruminant species out there. I’m blocked now but well, I’m not involved in education any more. The wilfully ignorant are not my problem. He’ll see it one day, when his personal domino falls, but I’m not here to save him. I’m here to save me, and anyone else who will listen.

My background is in intestinal microbiology. My PhD was on the metabolism in the gut of ruminant animals. So yes, I know what I’m talking about here.

I saw the bandwagon of methane reduction when it started. I worked in labs that jumped on that bandwagon. Some actually believed it would make a difference but most saw a good way to keep the department funded. Sadly, that part of science is necessary: experiments don’t pay for themselves. So, many labs run high-profile projects for funding and do the interesting stuff behind the scenes. You only get to hear about the interesting stuff when it finally does something impressive.

The interesting stuff won’t get any funding as speculation, it has to prove itself first. It does that on the back of bandwagon grants.

Methane is trivial as a greenhouse gas. It was long ago shown that water vapour is the major greenhouse effector but you can’t take exhalations and you can’t tax the sun on the ocean. Therefore, carbon dioxide and methane, extraordinarily tiny components of the air, have to be continuously blamed. There’s no money in steam.

If there was that much methane in the air then every time I lit a cigarette, the flare would be visible in Edinburgh. Methane isn’t inert, there are soil bacteria that use if for growth so it does get used up. It isn’t the final end product, it’s part of a cycle. I worked on methane oxidising bacteria as one of those Interesting Things at the back of another project. Didn’t get too far but I did get a paper out of it.

You cannot isolate one single reaction and claim you have the answer to the global ecosystem. It’s a very complex ecosystem. Change one part of it and all the rest will change to adapt to it. Like rabbits or cane toads in Australia – meddle with an ecosystem and all hell can break loose. One change is like toppling that first domino. It’s hard to stop the chain reaction once it starts.

The Green God’s religion does not recognise dominoes. To them, every scientific result is to be taken in isolation and then applied to the entire planet as Gospel. Unquestionable. ‘The science is settled’. Yeah, well, if it’s unquestionable then it’s not science. It’s a cult. They can’t grasp that.

The also can’t grasp that cows are not the only source of methane – in fact they aren’t even the major source. Mud flats, peat bogs, any swamp anywhere is pumping out methane all the time (I spent three years working on bacteria in estuarine mud flats too). And we won’t even start on what happens when a subsea methane clathrate collapses. The ice worms that live in them are cute though.

Cows don’t produce methane. No mammal does, not directly. Bacteria in their guts produce methane and those bacteria are not specific to the gut. They live in swampy ground and anywhere it’s wet and there’s no or very little oxygen. Including deep water. Cows are a small part of the whole ecosystem and yet they are to be wiped out to save the planet? Total extinction will have no measurable effect on methane production at all.

That’s not why they are being wiped out. They are to be removed so we don’t eat meat. There’s a reason for that.

I remember when butter was suddenly deemed a Terrible Thing. Spread butter on your toast and a heart attack was only hours away. It’s been shown to be bollocks now but it persisted for decades. It coincided with the rise of margarine, then the pretend-butter spreads I refer to as plasticine. Butter, it turns out, is healthier than the synthetics but it took a long time to get the truth past the censors.

Doesn’t matter if the cows are to be eradicated. All we’ll have left are the synthetics. Synthetic milk already exists. It’s horrible but it exists.

Sugar is suddenly evil. Well not really suddenly, it’s been sneered at for a long time. That started with the introduction of artificial sweeteners and has become harsher and more desperate recently as people are rejecting the synthetics in favour of actual sugar.

Today’s new product is insect protein. A whole industry is trying to get off the ground. Faced with the choice, would you pick the burger made from beef or the one made from cockroaches? Yeah, it’s not a hard choice.

So it has to be made a hard choice. Push up the price of meat with ‘greenhouse tax’ and ‘fat tax’ and boost the guilt trips and soon the roachburger is all you can afford. The drones fall for it every time.

I have seen Twitter drones insist that Electrofag is designed by the tobacco companies to keep us smoking. I don’t engage in conversation with that level of stupid, it’s so concentrated it might be contagious. There’s no point.

Electrofag is the biggest threat the tobacco companies have ever faced. I have several and I like them – although I still like the real ones too. Many have switched away from the real ones to Electrofag, and many new ‘smokers’ became new vapers instead. Isn’t that what those who hate tobacco companies wanted? A big dent in their profits?

It’s not what those who live on other people’s earnings want. Tobacco taxes account for an enormous amount of revenue and Electrofag is denting that too. This should give anti-tobacco governments a problem. Their drones will want to cheer on the demise of tobacco but those at the top can’t allow it to happen. What happens to their funding, their very reason for existence, if we all switch to vaping?

Fortunately the drone mind is easy to manipulate. Just tell them it’s another kind of tobacco, tobacco companies sell it, and all vapers turn into smokers. Those are all total lies, none of them ever happened, but the drones need no evidence. They will believe what they are told and block anyone who tries to tell them anything different.

Twitter is perfect for drone control. They’ll block any reasonable voice and end up talking amongst themselves, just reinforcing the indoctrination they’ve been exposed to until the Cult of the Green God is ready to launch its own jihad on we filthy heretics.

It’s not new. Many cults have used the same techniques to produce blindly-believing followers. This one pretends to use science. Its pronouncements come from academics.

I’ve met an awful lot of academics. Some are at genius level, most are merely clever but some make you wonder how they got in there. I can think of two PhD’s I’ve met who made me wonder if the qualification was really worth anything at all.

Yes, there are idiot academics. They make up for their uselessness by fast-talking and sounding convincing. The cunning ones build a following and the really devious get the press on side. It’s hard to sack someone when the press has built them up to hero status.

Personally I avoid any contact with the press. I talked to one once, was totally misrepresented and had phone calls from genuine scientists wondering what the hell I was up to. Now, I have no comment for any reporter anywhere. Read the journal papers, wait for the data to be published. I’m not talking until that’s done. At the moment I work as a consultant for commercial companies so can’t say much of anything anyway.

I’ve never blocked anyone on Twitter and never been blocked for abusive language. I’ve been blocked twice for agreeing with people, once for sympathising, and a few times for trying to tell them the truth. They don’t want the truth, they want their beliefs.

Let them have their beliefs. I work in science. Everything I do can be questioned and sometimes, those questions reveal to me something I’ve missed. I do not silence dissent. I encourage it. It’s a source of new information. I have no time to play with those who believe ‘the science is settled’.

I was listening to a kindred spirit, Foamy the Squirrel, this evening and he had a rant about stupid people. It was the usual totally over-the-top rant but he did have a point. I’m not sure he really made it though.

His point was that protecting stupid people with laws enforcing safety is dumbing down the entire race. We should let Darwin’s Natural Selection operate as intended. Well, we used to do that and while it was messy, idiots only did idiotic things once.

However, I’d go further.

My car has four wheel drive. Not all the time and (to my disappointment) it does not have a big lever to engage four wheel drive. The car does it all on its own. If the front wheels start to slip, it engages the back wheel drive all on its own.

It also has an automatic gearbox which I’ve decided is an idiotic machine. It changes up the gears far later than I would. Every time, I have gritted teeth as the engine revs climb and I’m thinking ‘change up, you bastard’.

I have only once tried to teach someone to drive. She paid for lessons instead.. You either learn it in the first five minutes or I give up teaching. I can teach you microbiology and I know it can take time because there’s a lot of it and some of it is hard, but a car only has a few buttons, pedals and switches. that matter. Mine has some I might never press… and it’s automatic, you don’t even need to learn gear changes.

The sunroof button (yes, the buggers make those electric too now) isn’t likely to get a lot of use in Scotland.

But I digress.

The car has all kinds of safety features that were once only found on Volvos. It means I can drive like a dick and know I have a better than average chance of walking away from a crash that will write off the car. I don’t drive like a dick because I blew my entire car budget on this one and can’t buy another one. But I could.

When I was driving my first car, a MkII Ford Cortina I bought for £75, it had no safety features. It barely had a dashboard. The steering was so loose I’d start turning the wheel a few metres before the corner. I took all the rubber plugs out of the floor to stop the leaks filling it with water and often drove it with only the driver’s seat installed. Sometimes it was even bolted to the floor.

It was a shit heap. So I drove very carefully indeed. If that car was totalled in a crash it was very likely to total me too.

Well okay, I did make the passengers jump now and then but the Cortina had corners you could see. Not like the modern ones where you can’t see where the front or back ends are. This was a rectangle when viewed from above and the driver had sight of every corner. I drove that thing through gaps with a quarter of an inch to spare each side. I wouldn’t do that with a modern car. The wavy lines look good but you’re never sure exactly how wide or long it is.

Nowadays I am older and a much more sedate driver (CStM will not mention TruckGate at this or any other point. It happened once and it was perfectly safe!).

I once drove a Ford Focus Estate for six months with nothing but the odometer functioning on the dashboard. I drove my Commer van in the same state for rather longer. Safety? Who needs it?

But to attempt to get back to the point, Foamy’s real argument goes beyond protecting stupid people. All this safety makes the rest of us complacent. Drivers who would have been careful drivers now think ‘well, I have seatbelts, air bags, side impact bars, I’m basically in a tank and I can take risks I wouldn’t normally even consider’.

It’s not just the idiots who crash any more.

It’s the same with tools. I have an electric sander (two, now, since I got a belt sander from my parents for my birthday) and they are festooned with things to stop me sanding my fingers off. I also have old style planes and saws that I am much more careful with because they have sharp edges and no safety features. I am much more likely to damage myself with the tools that have ‘safety’ features because the safety features should protect me – but they don’t always work.

Making safety a law was a bad idea. People expect to be safe all the time now. Even the ones who bang on about being ‘close to nature’. Nature is not safe. Nature is deadly. If you really want to be close to nature, try fending off an enraged badger naked and bare-handed. You have no chance. If you get stitched back together after that one, try a grizzly bear or a tiger – although if you are being all natural, no stitches.

Those are extremes. Total danger and total safety. Not so long ago, the human race had something in between. We called it common sense.

We didn’t go out in T-shirt and shorts when it was -10C and windchill took it down to -20C. We didn’t fight tigers naked. We didn’t drive with the belief the car was going to protect us with its safety features. We treated sharp tools – workshop and kitchen – with respect. We knew how to use weapons without bemusing the enemy by killing ourselves before they had a chance to.

For the upcoming generation, all that is gone.

Now, your personal safety is someone else’s problem and you can sue them for not doing it. Eventually, people will stop selling you anything you might hurt yourself with unless you sign a disclaimer first. Many of the new generation will refuse to sign so they’ll be carving the Sunday microwave roast with a spoon.

That assumes they still have roasts, what with acrylamide and the deadly bacteria imagined to be in everything. I think they can dish out boiled cockroach with a spoon safely.

There are books about the fall of ancient civilisations. They have a common theme. They died because they went soft. Scared of change, scared of anything that might hurt them, scared of death but waiting to die.

So did you think our Western civilisation would last forever? The Victorians thought the Empire was eternal and now we have British people wanting to apologise for it! I don’t hear those people demanding the Muslims apologise for the Ottoman empire nor for anyone else’s. That’s by the by, doesn’t matter. As the Brunnen G said, we deserve to die. They believe it as much as our Lefties, the difference is that our lefties don’t think it applies to therm.

This civilisation has run its course. Oh there will be another to follow, also believing itself eternal but it will die in time too. The Soviet Union, Rome, Etrusca, Greece, Egypt at the time of the Pharaohs, all were eternal and all are gone now. Time to move on.

I’m not scared by this. We will have a few fighters left, every time. There will always be those who rise against tyranny just as there will always be tyranny. They might lose but they will always try and there will always be more coming up the line.

Everyone is human. We are the same animal. We are a pack animal with a leader who is bigger and stronger than the rest. Somehow we got to the stage where the leader is more of a total twat than the rest but it won’t last. It never does.

The times, as Bob Dylan said. they are a-changing. For the better? Hahaha! As before they are changing to get to the same.

I am in some science books. They’ll never make the bestseller lists because they are horribly expensive books, but as a contributor I sometimes got a free one.

My favourite is a non-serious article called ‘Science and the Simulated Organism’ but that’s a story for another day.

It has long been an ambition of mine to produce science books in non-jargon language at an affordable price. Maybe Leg Iron Books will one day achieve that. Books students can read and not say ‘What the blistering fuck does that mean?’ on every second page. That could be fun and useful too.

It used to happen. I still have a copy of A.E. Lehninger’s ‘Biochemistry’ which is probably woefully out of date now but which was invaluable in getting me through the first year of university.

Ah, university, three years I’ll never recall in detail and some of the flashbacks still make me wince. And yet… I learned enough to pass with a good degree and impressed a few professors enough to get me invited on to a PhD course. Oh I didn’t apply for that. It only recently occurred to me that I have very limited experience in applying for any job. The ones I applied for, I mostly didn’t get. Most of them just happened. A phone call, ‘are you interested in this?’ sort of thing. I did begin to wonder if someone was trying to keep me out of the way.

I applied for the janitor job. Well, I called in about the job at 4 pm and was employed at 7 pm. Boss later told me she wasn’t sure I’d be up to it and gave me a chance. Today she sent more texts asking me to come back. I am tempted to put on the uniform for one day and go in, just to see the looks on the staff faces.

Universities are not what they were, some say. Yes, they are, although they are worse now. We had the dopey dicks in charge of the student’s union when I was there (1978-1981) and they insisted we buy life membership to the student union. I didn’t. The bars in there were cheap but so damn humourless we rarely used them. The Cardiff dockside bars were much more fun – back then, before they yuppiefied the whole derelict area.

Universities were always loaded with Leftie idealists and they’d get involved in committees and running the student’s union rather than doing proper student things like drinking and smoking and learning stuff with the remaining brain cells. They never grasped the simple equation that we ‘normal’ students managed to get real degrees in real subjects even though we had destroyed at least 50% of our thinking capacity with strong drink. They, on the other hand, managed to scrape a third in elementary witchcraft and daytime TV while abstaining from anything that could harm what little brain they possessed. Which, on the face of it, was probably a wise decision.

Basically, only idiots join committees and committees should be nothing more than a gateway drug into the secure psych ward or at least the remedial class or perhaps a bag and reservoir thing….

What Frank describes was starting to happen when I was in university. The useless and the downright dangerous-in-a-lab morons were pushed out of the way. Not fired, the union wouldn’t allow it, but shunted upward into admin and manager roles. The dopes were put in charge.

In those days it didn’t matter too much. Nobody took any notice of them anyway. Later though, they took control of the money and then things got very screwed up indeed. Research priorities changed. You couldn’t research for the sake of it any more, there had to be a profit motive.

Then the profit motive took over and it didn’t matter what the results really were, the conclusions had to fit the funder’s declared interests. That’s where we are now. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Get the right result or next year, you’re teaching HND tractor control.

The Leftie Loonies leave university with a determination to make the world a dark, sad and miserable place. I left university with a 2:1 Hons in microbiology and John Otway’s autograph on a copy of DK50/80. And a hangover. And a job as a research assistant working on oil spill degrading bacteria, that later morphed into a PhD on something entirely different.

You know what? In nearly 57 years, I have never been on any kind of march or picket line for anything.